An eternally small fish. A ponderously big pond.

Category Archives: The Days of Devotion Project

I don’t talk about my personal life on here for a lot for a number of reasons, but the foremost is that it isn’t why most of my reader’s are coming here. I’m sure you are all glad that I’m happily married to my wonderful wife, that I have a wonderful seven-year old/2nd grade girl, a wonderful one-year old bouncing baby girl, and a wonderfully supportive family…but that awesome family wasn’t what I started writing about. They definitely inspire me to follow me dreams and pursue my passions (of which writing is one), but…that’s just not the focus du jour here. I got my readership from talking about Heathenry, spirituality, philosophy, ethics, and devotional practice. As such, that’s what I try to focus on.

Awesome is hard to depict, but I think this historic marker for a time traveler comes close.

That being said, my life is about to become more busy, complex, and awesome…and I want to share that awesomeness. It also effects that devotional meme I’ve been working on, so we’re sort of on topic here any how.

Wife* and I have had to live with my parents for about the last year. That bouncing baby girl was a blessing of the unexpected variety, which had thrown a wrench into our long term plans; Wife ended up having to take a leave of absence from college due to the difficulty of the pregnancy, as Peanut was apparently a Thai Kick Boxer in a previous life. Three or four months later, I had a knee injury that complicated our plans even more. A worker’s compensation claim resulted, leaving us both out of job when that wasn’t what either of us wanted. My parents had a Mother-Daughter house, so we moved the three and a half of us in that empty space. It’s been cramped, but it’s been necessary. My family has a tradition of looking out after each other, and it’s a tradition that my parents and extended family have followed above and beyond the call of duty. In either case, Peanut was born, Wife started recovering, Munchkin started getting into the routines of her new school district, and we started rebuilding a long-term plan.

That plan was that Wife would work and I would stay home with the kids; her work record and schooling were both superior to mine, so she looked like she’d be the one likely to command the best wage. While I am intelligent and articulate and generally awesome, my resume revealed a work history in the bowels of retail and food. Those pay wages would cover the cost of gas, child care, and absolute nothing else, so that clearly wasn’t a step in the right direction. So, instead, we were going to get her into a groove at her job, get me some night classes for things I already knew how to do so I could prove to potential employers that I knew how to do them, and that I’d get a decent job of my own. We figured we’d be out on our own in a three to five years. Not the most desired time frame, but one we could work with.

Well, than that plan imploded in the best way possible. A friend of the family was trying to sell a house within walking distance of my parent’s house. We had helped her flip the property and set it up, so we had gotten to know her and she had gotten to know us. When she heard my wife had secured a job, she offered to work with us so that Wife and me could purchase it. Very suddenly we had a house on the horizon, one we knew the complete history of, one being sold under fair market price, and was within walking distance of my children’s grandparents and every building within the school district. Said children’s grandparents are willing to co-sign the mortgage so that we can get better rates, I’m a first time home buyer which means tax credits and better rates, and none of this requires us to change school districts again. So all I need is a job…any job…and two paychecks later we’ll be able to close a mortgage. Wife and I are, suddenly, time traveling two to four years in the future. Without a time machine.

Though if you’d like to buy us a Tardis for a housewarming gift, we’d certainly wouldn’t have a problem with that…

That’s pretty much a grand slam right there**.

Needless to say, that means a job search has become priority one. It’s also, quite possibly, priorities two through seven as well. Making sure the kids are being taken care of, looking for things to E-Bay to help subsidize the down payment, taking more freelance work so we can subsidize the down payment, looking for working appliances of various sorts, and a dozen other things are high on the list as well. As a result, a lot of personal work has to slide to the back-burner***…and right now the devotional meme has got to be one of those things. I’m boosting my devotional work in my day to day life and, for now, that will have to be enough.

That’s not to say the project is cancelled; it’s being postponed. As soon as my schedule normalizes a bit, I’ll be announcing a start date. It’ll probably go from daily to weekly however, as I’ll have a work schedule to contend with at that point as well. In either case, for those wondering why all the radio silence? That’s the reason. It’s an awesome reason mind you, but it is still a very involved and time consuming reason.

In the mean time, I’ll be writing whatever I can whenever my schedule offers me the opportunity. I have been pecking at some material here and there; I’ve just been too busy to polish it to the point where I’m happy enough with it to put it up for the world to see.

In either case, anyone wishing to send us good wishes/prayers/energy or what have you is more than welcome and invited to do so. I’d also like to take a moment to thank the Gods, Goddess, my ancestors, and whatever wights have helped us here or will be helping us. My thanks especially to Loki, who has help me keep my oars in the water, no matter how chaotic and turbulent that water.

I’d like to also thank any of my close, personal friends who don’t avoid me in the coming weeks in spite of the fact that I am very likely to ask for their help in moving. 😉

*I never use the names of my Wife and/or kids on here. Aside of maintaining a veil of privacy for my family…well, there are a number of people in the Heathen and Pagan communities who have shown that they have some pretty fundamentalist perspective and poor impulse control. The more insulation between them and my family, the better. On here I call the baby “Peanut” and the seven year old “Munchkin”. I call my wife, “Wife”. Presume her to be amazing, awesome, and wise beyond her years. Also, sexy.

**The reader may choose whether to view this as a Grand Slam in the sense of Baseball or in the sense of Denny’s breakfast menu. Whichever one you like better.

***It was also my intention to take part in NaNoWriMo, which also looks highly unlikely due to the same circumstances.

As I said when I was talking about the faux-issue of Marvel’s upcoming female Thor and her villainous, un-loresque mammary glands (as well as the blatant hypocrisy behind that selective outrage), I’ve been feeling burnt out lately. It wasn’t just the murder of innocents at the hands of some fascist, Heathen fraud. It wasn’t in reflecting on the cases of child molestation that came up within the pan-Pagan community, and ruminating over that while trying to look at my own daughters and not be afraid for them. It wasn’t in the process of assisting in running a fund raiser*, helping out in a local pan-Pagan group with their May Faire event, or addressing a lack of professional ethics in how one of my fellow Heathen writers choose to addess criticism. It isn’t even the weight of constantly being exposed to some of the hateful bile that comes from the fascist and racist rhetoric passed off as Heathen tradition, nor watching the pointless police brutality of Ferguson, Missouri.

It has been all of it; all of these issues coming at us consecutively, and often concurrently as well. Truth be told I was almost giddy when an extremely vocal faction of Heathenism lost their minds over a comic book character, because it gave me a nice and easy issue to talk about that didn’t effect me at the core of my being. I could just unwind and produce some dialogue that cut to the heart of the matter without effort; my heart and faith weren’t getting hurt in the process. Compound that with some of the material I have written but not yet posted, which has been going through more revisions that I can count due to the weight of the topic being discussed, and I’ve been pretty damn spent. Some real life dilemmas and/or projects** have also gotten in the way, and it has resulted in me feeling extremely exhausted.

So, I decided to start recharging my batteries with a “devotional meme” project that I will publishing on my blog in the coming weeks.

I am going to be engaging in something similar to those “30 Days of Devotion” things that are going around. I’ve fleshed out some of the questions I intend to use, and I’ve also taken inspiration from some of the memes of other bloggers. My plan, however, is not to start with a script of thirty days worth of questions. Instead, I’m looking to have about twenty question (or so) related to devotional work, philosophy, worship, and spirituality…and the rest will be questions I answer from any readers and/or peers who care to post them. If I get less than thirty, I’ll still have the chance to charge my batteries and restore my focus. If I end up with more than thirty, I’m just help to contribute to the dialogue surrounding devotional practices. Either way, it’s a net positive. I’m looking to help myself expand my spiritual horizons and, at the same time, get some respite from all of the horrific, soul-sucking news that’s going on in the realm of current events. I want to re-immerse myself in my spirituality, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my devotional work took a downward spiral while I was so focused on the headlines.

So in the comments below, post some of your favorite devotional/worship/spirituality based questions. Ones that you have struggled with, ones that you think are at the core of spirituality itself, or things that you just want to see be talked about more. If you think of some after I start, feel free to post them as well…in any of the posts with “The Days of Devotion” as a category, for ease of organization. If you are a blogger yourself, perhaps you can answer your own question as well. Better yet, I’ll be posting the initial schedule a day or two before I begin and it’ll be adjusted with any needed updates. So if you want to repeat this entire meme later or even participate in it along side of me, you’ll be able to do so. Devotional rumination for it’s own sake, on a community based level, can be a potent force…and if I (or we) can help recharge the batteries of others along the way, all the better.

This suggestion is not limited to Northern European/Heathen based Polytheism either; if the project sounds worthwhile to you, and you are a devotionally engaged, Polytheist of any sort, feel free to join in! There is nothing wrong with taking a moment to remind yourself that the world is still a potentially beautiful place in spite of all of the despicable nonsense that occurs around us. I’ve been focusing a lot on the former lately, and I feel that it is high time to take a moment for some of the later.

More details to come, so stay tuned!

*On that note, I was directly connected with the event but I was probably the one who was least involved in the day to day affairs of it. Those accolades go more to Josh Gamble and James Calico. I tried to put the word out, I tried to put some of the words together, and it was out collective project…but those two did a lot to help bring that event together and they deserve the lion’s share of the credit. **For those of you thinking of flipping a house, let me give you some advice: don’t.